Faction Imbalance at an all-time high H80-A20

[Benitora]

Racials should not effect combat only visual effects.

All races should have unique spelleffects to match it's race across all classes when needed.

So you can play whatever you like and maybe restore some balance? I am also for mixed horde and alliance dungeon and raid groups, maybe even community groups.

It isn't a racial issue anymore.
It used to be that top guilds went for the strongest racials in order to progress the harder content, but now it's more of a social issue that has snowballed due to popular exposure from top end guilds going horde.

The popular take is that if you want to join hardcore guilds, go horde, as that's where most of the population of people wanting to do that type of content is.
With the removal of the barrier in 9.2.5, I can see certain guilds reroll into alliance races for their racials, as for High M+ and raiding, as certain Alliance racials are more powerful or useful than the horde ones.

The social aspect is not going to change however. From the outset, people will think horde is the way to go when it comes to doing high difficulty content.

[Stormxraven]

There has been a noticeable shift toward horde, you can see there are far more out in the world particularly warmode. One annoying thing is tagging, its an oudated function

[chiddie]

We told Blizzard for Years to remove Racial Spells

They didnt listen

We told Blizzard for Years that Players will move to the other Faction

They didnt listen


I mean. Fuck them at this Point ? Ignoring your Playerbase for Years because you are busy sexually harassing your Workers instead of making sure your Cash Cow keeps going


Faction Change cost are also a big fucking Joke at this Point. It should not cost more than 5-10$ / €

I think that the only thing actually preventing population to be 95% horde and 5% alliance is the faction change not costing 5 dollars. XD

[Utrrabbit]

Ok? Who cares?

Play the game. Stop worrying abour what others do. I have 40 toons, over half of them are alliance. My main is horde only cause the people ive been playimg with for over 15 years are horde.

[Kithelle]

This has been going on forever, they haven't done anything to change...what makes you think they'd change now? The game is leaning closer towards uniting the factions than showing any kind of fairness to the Alliance

[Recovery]

Faction imbalance is going to be a thing forever, until there is only one faction.

I started out as Alliance in Vanilla, went Horde in TBC (Blood Elf Paladin), and was Horde till end-legion, then went Alliance again.

Another way to solve it is by making a racial talent system, have people put points into various racial abilities, the more points, the stronger/more bonus, after 5-10 points, it unlocks multiple racial activation abilities where you can select two, opening up to racial builds such as:

2-3 stats bonuses following various combinations of activation abilities such as:

Orc: Bonus Reputation (Human), Frost Damage Resistance (Dwarf), Increased versatility (HM Tauren), Rocket Jump (Goblin), Enrage to increase dmg (Orc).
Human: Increased Stamina (Tauren), Resistant to arcane dmg (Blood Elf), Increased agility, Int, Str (Draenei), Arcane Torrent (Blood Elf), Shadowmeld (Night Elf).
Troll: Increased dodging (Night Elf), Critical Chance increased (Worgen), Reduced duration of Poisons, curses, and diseases (Mag'har), Cannibalize (Undead), Stoneskin (Dwarf).

Note: Worgen's transformation, is not a racial, but part of the race.

Pros: There won't be racial restrictions on races and options, and with 9.2.5, you can basically pick whatever faction you wanna be, you can still raid with whatever people you are able to on either faction.
Pros: Another selection of options for players to make their favorite race theirs to play.
Cons: It'll more or less toss another shred of racial fantasy off, leaving only appearance, lore, and homeland as the only thing making it different from other races.
Cons: Another system implemented.

Honestly, just take the racial abilities from the races and put them into the new utility talent tress that launch with dragonflight. This wont solve everything, but it will solve some of the specific reasons that people choose 1 faction over the other. The issue is that anything that is done to "fix" it at this point wont effect imbalance. If something like i noted above is done now, its not likely that people will spend the money to swap factions as they wont need to, especially with x faction play. However, if the above was implemented AND blizzard allowed a 1 time per character faction change for, say, 72 hours, you might see some improvement.

If I could have Human / Orc racial on any race, every last one of my characters would forever be blood elf / void elf.

[Gloriandus]

Just remove the stupid racials and make the racial focus on cosmetics (collectibles and...gulp...LORE). Yeah, I'd miss the 10% rep bonus as a human. I'll get over it. Blizzard seems to finally ken that they need to remove as many barriers to gameplay as possible. This would be another unnecessary barrier gone.

[sunxsera]

First server i ever played on was Azshara-EU. Was a solid 50-50 server back in the day.
Changed to ~ 20-80 in mop & wod. Made me transfer to Blackmoore which is still a ~45-55 high pop server to this day.

They should have balanced the pvp servers years ago.

[Gehco]

Honestly, just take the racial abilities from the races and put them into the new utility talent tress that launch with dragonflight. This wont solve everything, but it will solve some of the specific reasons that people choose 1 faction over the other. The issue is that anything that is done to "fix" it at this point wont effect imbalance. If something like i noted above is done now, its not likely that people will spend the money to swap factions as they wont need to, especially with x faction play. However, if the above was implemented AND blizzard allowed a 1 time per character faction change for, say, 72 hours, you might see some improvement.

If I could have Human / Orc racial on any race, every last one of my characters would forever be blood elf / void elf.

This is what I initially thought but would be a lot of extra work to put it into the new talent trees for every spec vs. making a new tree in a different tab/row (like PvP talents, but a bit more options).

[Thorqin]

They call it "World of Hordecraft" for a reason. There is no "fixing" faction imbalance 18 years into the game.

At this point, have the Horde become the only faction and put the Alliance out of its misery.

If the ratio is already at 80% to 20%, then the Alliance is far too small and insignificant to bother saving.

Frankly it's a waste of time and resources.

[Celement]

First server i ever played on was Azshara-EU. Was a solid 50-50 server back in the day.
Changed to ~ 20-80 in mop & wod. Made me transfer to Blackmoore which is still a ~45-55 high pop server to this day.

They should have balanced the pvp servers years ago.

You couldn't of balanced the pvp servers as when they existed with only a few notable exceptions players purposefully rerolled onto servers where their faction dominated.

War mode still has this behavior as the lions share of pvp is groups picking off lone wolf players.

- - - Updated - - -

They call it "World of Hordecraft" for a reason. There is no "fixing" faction imbalance 18 years into the game.

At this point, have the Horde become the only faction and put the Alliance out of its misery.

If the ratio is already at 80% to 20%, then the Alliance is far too small and insignificant to bother saving.

Frankly it's a waste of time and resources.

Odds are it will be the reverse. Not due to population but from a narrative point of view the horde really only exists to be cartoon villains for the alliance to smack down every few years.

[Accendor]

This is true and will be true. But again, there will always be more Hordish players due to aesthetics and diversity of the races.



This also sounds like good idea - tho it would take extra development time i think that now, or maybe next expansion, while they are "refreshing core systems" would be great time to look into racial system and probably tinker a bit.




Dunno where did you get "Well, maybe she overdid it, better blame her to appease the Alliance" idea since, as Horde only player who is generally mingling in Horde circles i can tell you that hardly any Horde player that i know of didnt condemn Sylvanas for her actions the moment they saw it.
I mean even people who played exclusively Undead's for their waifu were not happy with her actions.
She even killed bunch of her own people, which cant reproduce , at the Gathering in the Arathi Highlands, did she not?

The thing is that due to how the story was scripted we didnt have more impactful option how to deal with the issue.
That doesnt mean that we didnt condemn her actions, we just kinda didnt have the option to do so because.. well storywriters.
I mean only difference between two choices were few ingame cinematics and different lines of text and thats it.

My guild dealt with that issue the simple way - we all made Ally characters and played trough The Battle for Lordaeron Questline on Ally side to get her.
And left those characters behind us.

In fact, Horde backlash was so severe that they had to "wash" her actions with whole "its not me, its my Bwonsamdi/Zovaal" thing.

Im not gonna deny, Horde did some atrocious thigs, and as Horde player, im not proud of them, but please dont pin that shit event that was used as plot twist for poorly executed storyline and, in fact, poorly executed, forgettable expansion (Shadowlands) onto Horde.

Tho i do hope that Undead's will now get Calia Menethil as their fraction leader and Sylvanas being on backburner for some time.

Just to make this clear: I never meant the players. The vast vocal majority of the horde players hated the story as much as the alliance players. I am only talking about the lore here and the ingame story that has been told.

[marcusblood]

I don't know if the numbers are true, but I believe that cross faction play is about 8 years too late. At the end of MoP, switching to Horde was just beginning, and they needed to stop the bleeding there. But as always, Blizz is too late to act.

[Neuroticaine]

That's a weird way of saying "The Horde is more popular because it got pretty elves".

- - - Updated - - -



I think the exact opposite is true: People play the Horde, because the Horde has the most pretty race. Evident by the fact that about 40-50% of all Horde characters are BElves.

I mean, I have historically played Blood Elves because I liked their aesthetics and their lore, but I stick around on the Horde side because I still like the lore and characters of all the other races I interact with while playing the game.

I could easily make a Void Elf that looks exactly like a High Elf if that's all that matters, but I don't like the Alliance, their characters, their cultures or their lore.

[LordVargK]

I mean, I have historically played Blood Elves because I liked their aesthetics and their lore, but I stick around on the Horde side because I still like the lore and characters of all the other races I interact with while playing the game.

I could easily make a Void Elf that looks exactly like a High Elf if that's all that matters, but I don't like the Alliance, their characters, their cultures or their lore.

Of course you could do that now. But the Horde got pretty elves 10 years before the Alliance, thus players who rolled BElf in those 10 years won't switch back to Alliance now just to play the same race with other hair colors. The damage is done and can't be reverted.
The Horde having better lore is pretty much just adding insult to injury here.

[sunxsera]

You couldn't of balanced the pvp servers as when they existed with only a few notable exceptions players purposefully rerolled onto servers where their faction dominated.

War mode still has this behavior as the lions share of pvp is groups picking off lone wolf players.

- - - Updated - - -



Odds are it will be the reverse. Not due to population but from a narrative point of view the horde really only exists to be cartoon villains for the alliance to smack down every few years.

Well, you are kinda right - but they could have been more ristircitive. Not hard for blizz to run a script that counts max lvl chars on both sides and says "Hey, it's 60-40 right now - one faction is blocked for new characters." Players that allready have a max lvl char on that server could still create new ones though.
I know it's not a perfect solution i know - just what i came up with rn.

I play on a huge server that has ~50-50. And in warmode i get phased with people from other servers. Because somehow there are only one or two shards for the actual realm.
Before they introduced warmode we had some awesome battles on the realm. Not often - but they happened. Now everything is just typical phased warmode 40vs1. Can't even organize a raid vs. raid in open world because of phasing.

[Neuroticaine]

Of course you could do that now. But the Horde got pretty elves 10 years before the Alliance, thus players who rolled BElf in those 10 years won't switch back to Alliance now just to play the same race with other hair colors. The damage is done and can't be reverted.
The Horde having better lore is pretty much just adding insult to injury here.

The overall split according to most available numbers shows that Blood Elves take up about the same percentage of the total population as Humans and Night Elves (not combined, all three races make up about 14-15% of the total characters each). What's more interesting is that the split is a lot less skewed for the other races on Horde. Significantly more people on Horde play races OTHER than Blood Elves, than the Alliance players playing any race other than Human or Night Elf, leading more into the idea that people just think Horde races in general are cooler.

So on both sides, the most "normal" race is the overwhelmingly most popular race, which is what you usually see regardless of game, people have a tendency to pick fairly average looking characters they can relate to better. And then on the Horde side, more players play the less "normal" races than Alliance players do.

[The-Shan]

I think it'll get fixed in 9.2.5, or at least it can start to heal, especially when cross-faction guilds are allowed.

[Battlebeard]

They should have merged the factions already in Cataclysm or something. It's a stupid idea to begin with. World PvP has always, always sucked, makes no sense with factions at all.

[Cthulhu 2020]

Ok? Who cares?

Play the game. Stop worrying abour what others do. I have 40 toons, over half of them are alliance. My main is horde only cause the people ive been playimg with for over 15 years are horde.

Plenty of people have one main and very few alts that they barely play. As the alliance dies off, it becomes harder for alliance players to find proper raiding, w hich leads them to go horde as well, compounding the problem.

But this post is the shining example of "Well this problem doesn't affect me so the rest of you should stop complaining about it"